Disorder in the House

By Rick Moody

Published: January 23, 2005

EPILEPTIC
By David B.
Illustrated. 361 pp. Pantheon Books. $25.

These days, it's easy to see the enormous influence that cartooning and comics have had on popular cinema. It's as if Hollywood has no other source and no other style for its family-friendly entertainments. Less well observed is the relationship between literature and comics. While there are worthy precursors, to be sure, the ascent of comics into the realm of the literary began in earnest in 1986 with the publication of Art Spiegelman's ''Maus.'' And with Chris Ware's ''Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth'' (2000), comics and comic artists became unavoidable in literary circles. Ware's masterpiece even burlesques this infiltration on its endpapers, in a mock newspaper article entitled ''New Pictorial Language Makes Marks: Good for Showing Stuff, Leaving Out Big Words,'' which runs in part as follows:

''Certain publishing houses are experimenting with this new form, test-marketing carefully demographed entertainments and then strategically aiming them at a less-educated and/or intellectually blunted segment of the consumer pool. The results, thus far, are encouraging. 'Dumb people are eating it up,' says our researcher. 'They love it. Especially people who buy a lot of stuff. This could be big.' ''

People are devouring the graphic novel across the whole range of human I.Q.'s. It's not uncommon now for readers of literature to admire Chris Ware or Julie Doucet or Joe Sacco or Joe Matt with a partisan vigor formerly reserved for renegades like Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. Among the reasons for this popularity is that comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is. Literary fiction, obsessed on the one hand with defending itself against the popularity of cinema, is too preoccupied with story. On the other hand, in competing with poetry, it is occasionally dazzled by abstraction and cerebral firepower. Between the two once lay the novel of manners, in which we found Henry James perfectly depicting the way an American ing?e wore a gown or entertained a suitor. You read this kind of social observation only infrequently today. But Chris Ware is great at drawing it. So is Chester Brown, for example, in his bittersweet graphic novel ''I Never Liked You.''

Artists in Europe and Asia have also capitalized on the ascent of the graphic novel, in the process supplying their own notions of the form. And so we have, for example, ''Epileptic,'' by David B. (the pseudonym of Pierre-Fran?s Beauchard, who lives in Montreuil, France), translated by Kim Thompson and published in this country by Pantheon, which also brought us Spiegelman and Ware. Just as the European novel has a different set of concerns from its American relations, so does David B.'s story have preoccupations we might not ordinarily find in a graphic novel. Well, for one, it's not a novel at all, but a memoir.

Historians of the graphic form will observe that Spiegelman, Sacco and others (one stunning example is the recent prose/graphic hybrid ''Diary of a Teenage Girl'' by Phoebe Gloeckner) have all experimented with autobiography in their work, but in the case of ''Epileptic'' the autobiographical impulse has, in my view, more to do with what's happening in French writing these days, namely l'autofiction. If, against the advice of conservatives, you should travel to the Paris of 2005, you would find that the traditional roman ?lef of French literature has lately given way to a cottage industry of remorselessly literary accounts of the intimate lives of French nationals. David B.'s story, in broad outline, is about the desperate attempts of his family to deal with his older brother's chronic epilepsy; it is consonant with the confessional literary impulse in French letters, but as befits the graphic genre, it also takes liberties with the form. The young narrator, Pierre-Fran?s, for example, is obsessed with military history, and therefore the particulars of his brother's story are interwoven with the young artist's myriad imaginings of the invasions of the Mongols, his grandfather's experiences in World War I, and tales of the Algerian war and the French Resistance.

Moreover, because David B.'s brother, Jean-Christophe, began to experience the symptoms of his seizure disorder in the late 60's, the family made use of the alternative therapies of the time. So there are sad and hilarious passages in ''Epileptic'' about the macrobiotic communes of France. (''Soon, the entire commune is running entirely on guilt. The society we left behind has recreated itself. We have a macrobiotic cook, macrobiotic judges, macrobiotic cops.'') David's parents also consult the Rosicrucians. (''It's awesome. My brother, my sister and I are part of a secret society. Each one of us is given a grade.'') They also experiment briefly with alchemy. All in pursuit of relief for their afflicted son.

In short, ''Epileptic'' constitutes something new: a graphic intellectual history. A design-oriented history of ideas. There are entire dreams illustrated here in a disturbing and rococo illustrative style, with interpretations included, as if David B. were channeling Jung's ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' or Freud's writings on the oneiric. There are allusions to May 1968 and the role of the French intellectual in contemporary Gallic life, and there are ghosts in profusion, ghosts of Europe past. These include the ghost of the author's grandfather, a man of somewhat dubious ideas, depicted so he resembles one of those beaked denizens of hell you find in Hieronymus Bosch.

Because it is unafraid to dwell in detail on cultural and intellectual lineage, ''Epileptic'' seems to be influenced as much by Gide, Foucault, Malraux and Barthes as by Spiegelman. It is less a graphic novel, that is, than a bildungsroman about the artist as reader of continental philosophy, wherein Jean-Christophe's epilepsy, and its attendant familial disorder, are the fulcrum that forces Pierre-Fran?s to become the author David B., spawning his magnificent pictures, drawings full of the iconographies of both atavism and surrealism.

Here in the United States, it is perhaps fair to say that the memoir is a triumph-over-adversity genre. (The English title of this book, ''Epileptic,'' is an indication of this, since it's much less interesting than the French title, ''L'Ascension du Haut-Mal.'') We find many examples here of the memoir of overcoming alcoholism, of incest survival, of discovering the joys of sodomy. Some of these books are genuine and poignant, but the form, hemmed in by the need for a predictable epiphany and triumph, has become a pale shadow of the creative medium it might be. But just as the graphic novel has borrowed from the acute observational skills of the great literary writers of the past, so ''Epileptic'' borrows from the great cultural and intellectual archeologies of French nonfiction of the last 100 years, while remaining both accessible and moving.

The graphic novel may originally have been aimed at ''a less-educated and/or intellectually blunted segment of the consumer pool,'' as Chris Ware observed, but ''Epileptic'' proves that this relatively new form can be as graceful as its august literary forebear. Recent novels by Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon have indicated how formative comics can be for writers who rely only on words. Now comic artists are expressing their facility with the strategies and ambitions of the word-smitten crowd. This cross-pollination is to be celebrated.

Drawing: A detail from a panel in David B.'s graphic memoir ''Epileptic.'' At left, David B.'s self-portrait from the dust jacket of ''Epileptic.''